Bring on the eschaton!

The Tempe Working Explained (Part Two)

DUNCAN: Looking over the text of the second working, a lot of it is explicitly concerned with the difficulties of communicating with Tempe. We certainly knew there was a problem, even if we weren't aware at the time exactly what it was.

ALAN: Yes. The vision began with the rune NIED, inverted, which indicates: 'setting off on the wrong path and that to continue in the same manner will result in failure'. Because of the pointless occult speculation we'd forced Tempe into during the last working, this second operation began with completely the wrong intent and expectations.

DUNCAN: We just kept at it, though, until he gave in and started to talk with us. There were some interesting results from the part where you asked him: 'Who is Alan? Who is Duncan?' He stated that you were 'a head on a platter made of a fountain of white light' (i.e. The Baptist's Head!). Me, I was: 'The wand. The snake. The eye in the pyramid'. In March this year, after I'd heard about your enlightenment, I received a spontaneous vision whilst I was meditating in which I saw a vast eye staring at me, and then my soul was transferred into the inside of a pyramid where your soul was already waiting. I've described this in more detail elsewhere, but it's quite clearly a prophecy that my enlightenment would occur after yours. Yet again, Tempe is not predicting a specific event or giving an 'answer' to questions, but throwing out a kind of synchronistic marker – i.e. I'm not 'the eye in the pyramid' in any specific sense, but his provision of this symbol loaded my subsequent vision of the eye and the pyramid with a huge whack of synchronistic meaning than it wouldn't have had otherwise.

ALAN: I was obsessed with finding out whether the speculative articles I wrote after the first working were correct or not. His answers with regard to two of them are non-committal, but I think his response of 'an energy biding its time that is not going in a particular direction' with respect to what I wrote in Unreasonable Foresight is a polite way of saying it's all fantasy. He was telling us a faked alien invasion was not going to happen, and then I insist on asking him how to prepare for it! At this point he gave us the tarot card, THE SUN, which indicates we should enjoy life by concentrating on the positive and looking for its realisation. It was his attempt to get us back on track, but once again it proved futile. As we continue to persist, he gives us the Greek letter Omega, which means 'last'. I think now that he was trying to tell us this nonsense must come to an end!

DUNCAN: After this he falls silent and I start to sense explicitly that he doesn't want to answer these sorts of questions.

ALAN: Didn't stop us, though. We take his presentation of the rune ANSUZ to mean the ability to sail through the coming crisis. But this probably meant at the time 'will you please just let go of all that crap!'

DUNCAN: And next there's some interesting stuff about the 'false messiah', which was the meaning we took from the references to the Yemen in the first working. Including that freaky bit when he gave me the number '555' at exactly the same moment as you were looking at the clock (which I couldn't see) and had noticed the time was '5:55'.

ALAN: It's not there in the original commentary, due to our confusion, but 555 is a number that represents me, as discussed in my magical record. It all makes complete sense once you consider that I am the 'false messiah' who 'is imprisoned at the moment' – i.e. I'm not enlightened! The false messiah is also described as 'a head on a stick', which I think demonstrates Tempe's sense of humour. I ask him when I should set up a new magical order and he replies with an image of tunnels at the end of which is something nasty. As I discussed elsewhere, this simply means: 'When you're enlightened'.

DUNCAN: He combined that last image with a specific message: 'You are with someone. An older figure. Near water or on a boat. It is positive. 33'.

DUNCAN: Which brings us to those freaky co-ordinates! '1792. 1813 or 1830.'

ALAN: Tempe's answer here is stunningly precise. On the day of my enlightenment, I travelled to the Andaman Islands, which match the first set of co-ordinates: 17'N 92'E. It was here that I formulated the idea of Open Enlightenment (OE), the new 'magical order'. 18'N 30'E is the border of Egypt and Sudan, where I ended my around the world trip at Abu Simbel. This is without doubt the most mind-blowingly accurate prediction Tempe has made, which he provided at a time when I was actually planning to travel the world in the opposite direction.

DUNCAN: I went on-line and checked it out for myself, and I think it needs pointing out that the co-ordinates are not spot on. The first set, for instance, are actually somewhere at sea to the north-west of the Andaman Islands. But both sets are obviously in the right area. It is quite mind-boggling, especially given that neither of us at the time had any detailed understanding of longitude and latitude and – as you say – your travel plans were completely different back then.

ALAN: When I asked him if there were anything else he gave me the word 'Caesar'. Whilst attending a beach party in the Andaman Islands, I saw a man dressed as Julius Caesar. Tempe also mentioned 'a boat' and 'swallows'. In April, I visited Thailand and on a white-water rafting trip (which most certainly involved a boat), a man struck up a spontaneous conversation with me about swallows. These were separate events from my meeting with the guru. So, again, we're left wondering whether Tempe's predictions are just synchronicities, or whether it's better to consider some of them as referring to a number of events but rolled into one answer.

DUNCAN: In the next part of the working we waste a lot more time on pointless questions, but as we turn to the theme of when we're going to get enlightened the answers become more revealing again.

ALAN: The meaning of the answer in my case is even now not entirely clear. He describes an unusual character like 'the German character Eszett surmounted by a cross', which we've not been able to trace.

DUNCAN: I think now that this might have been ɮ or lezh, a symbol for 'the voiced alveolar lateral fricative', the guttural L-sound that in Classical Arabic is represented by the letter Dad. Mo
st people pronounce this sound with the left side of the tongue. The Prophet Mohammed, reputedly, could pronounce it on both sides at once. This symbol might therefore be taken to mean: 'something that only a prophet can'. It's not clear, is it? What Tempe said regarding my case, however, was a bit more obvious: 'A honey bee. A dart. A lance.' After I heard of your enlightenment, I contacted my Holy Guardian Angel and asked what I needed to do in order to finish up the process. My HGA communicates through the runes and the answer I received was: TIR (inverted), BEORC, WUNJO. In all his communications, my HGA has used WUNJO to represent enlightenment. BEORC resembles the letter 'B'. TIR is in the shape of an arrow. Tempe, then, was looking forward to this message from my HGA, but the 'bee' is actually a 'B', and the 'dart' or 'lance' isn't literal, but the symbolic representation of an arrow that is TIR. It's that same mode of synchronicity rather than literal prediction.

ALAN: After this I asked him whether out work was related to the prophecy of Crowley's successor given in The Book of the Law. Tempe replied with an image of plants and bulbs that flower and die with no trace, yet return the next year. And then the image of a monk. I think this makes it clear that our work is a different but successive expression of the tradition of magick. We didn't grasp this at the time, though, and it seems from this point as if Tempe has finally had enough and becomes frustrated with the method of communication.

DUNCAN: Our attempts at allowing him to possess us physically proved pretty lame, although some of the stuff he said when speaking through you seems clear enough.

ALAN: Yeah: 'The basis is to advance, not to stall and wonder… It is done. I'm gone.' He's being pretty explicit. We've spent the most part of this second working wasting his and our time with the pointless speculative occult fantasy.

DUNCAN: Luckily we got mostly back on track in the third working. Those synchronicities with the tarot in the third working were pretty amazing, even at the time.